The Worth of Education

I know it's not necessary to have a college education to be a writer. You can just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get to it. But as I'm sitting here waiting on class to start, I'm really glad I decided to take this route to better my writing.

The thing that really impresses me about being involved in a good creative writing program is the quality of the feedback. If I was just sitting around in my underwear, writing and submitting stories, getting rejections, writing and submitting more stories, I'd not have a good grounding in where I stand as a writer. Trial and error works okay, but I like being able to shoot an email to my Fiction adviser and have her give me her thoughts on it. She catches stuff I never would and spends the time to help me figure out what's "just not right" and what works well. Editors don't have time to do that for you, so you end up thinking you're a better writer than you really are.

Besides the humble pie aspect of it, it's great to step through some great literature and disect it. I'm learning more than I thought I would and I highly encourage anyone serious about becoming a writer, especially if you have your eye on fiction, like I do, to be involved in a good creative writing program somewhere. Your writing will improve and your opinion of yourself will go down. Both directions will work to your advantage in the end.